"Nightmare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a nightmare. How long, I wondered, had Jerry and his friends been educating themselves on my private thoughts? But at least this rebellion of theirs was an idea ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... Certainly I do not ask to be accepted as Ilam Carve. I was leading a placid and agreeable existence in a place called Putney, an ideal existence with a pearl among women, when my tranquillity was disturbed and my life transformed into a perfect nightmare by a quarrel between a retail trades-man (indicating EBAG) and a wholesale ink-dealer (indicating TEXEL) about one of my pictures. It does not concern me. My role is and will be passive. If I am forced into the witness-box I shall answer questions ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... moment longer, Sister Nightmare," answered Scarecrow "I thought I had a glimpse of something behind ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... that ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, is yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grand Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare—like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the Carceri. Idling there at noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers of those high galleries with ladies, the space ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... obscure poverty to success and ample means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to make both ends meet, but the ten subsequent years had built for him this pleasant home and banished his long familiar anxieties to the land of nightmare. 'It came just in time,' he was in the habit of saying to those who had his confidence. 'I was at the point where a man begins to turn sour, and I should have soured in earnest.' The process had been most effectually arrested. People were occasionally ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... such a giddy height that when it slipped from my impotent hands it naturally performed a long oscillation, and touched the point Despair. That was a miserable time. I hope you have never suffered what I suffered then. I lived in a perpetual nightmare—like the stupor at intoxication." He paused, as he had done before, and then, with a painfully nervous laugh, be added, "Yes, like intoxication. I drank." Suddenly a spasm seemed to pass over his face, be looked serious and sad as before, and he said, with a shudder, "It's a terrible ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... she knew it from Rose's own lips, a month before he heard of it through Bill. She was too grateful for their narrow escape to feel vindictive and might have convinced herself they had merely endured a bad nightmare if it had not been for the shiny Victrola; the sight of it underscored the whole experience and she wished there were some way to get rid of the thing, a wish that was echoed even more fervently by Martin. In the evenings ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... her and do the Press Work. Also there was the Grass Widow who remembered her Husband's name but had mislaid the Address. Also the Old Boarder who was always under the influence of Pepsin. He would come down to Breakfast wearing the Hoof-Marks of a Nightmare Seventeen Hands high and holler about the Food and tell the Young Lawyer how you can't believe anything you see in the Papers. Also there was a young man employed in a Furniture Store who knew that he could put Eddie Sothern on the Fritz if he ever got a ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... the old woman's Arab masters. Sometimes this girl came to see her mother, and we arranged the bath on the inflated skins, and had her towed across for a few days. This was Masara's greatest happiness, but her constant apprehension; the nightmare of her life was the possibility that her daughter should be sold and parted from her. The girl was her only and all absorbing thought, the sole object of her affection: she was the moon in her mother's ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... last. The massive granite portal vanished behind him in the evening mists, much as a nightmare vanishes. He, Alan Vernon, who for a year or more had been in bondage, was a free man again. All his dreams of wealth had departed; indeed if anything, save in experience, he was poorer than when first the shadow of yonder doorway fell upon him. But at ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... thrown into convulsions. Though I pulled my hat over my eyes and clapped both hands to my ears, as I rushed out of the hall after a stay of five minutes, the vision of horror followed me, and for the first and only time in my life, I had such a hideous nightmare that night, that the man who slept in the next room broke open my door to ascertain who was strangling me. Of all my pet aversions my most supreme abhorrence is of what are denominated 'gifted women'; strong-minded ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... rice- and millet-fields and vegetable gardens unbroken by wall or hedge; nothing to cast a shadow on the dead level except an occasional walled town or temple grove! And the horrible land was all alive with swarming, toiling, ant-hill humanity. It was a nightmare. ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Well, sir, it's got to be so bad that it annoys me terribly. It keeps me awake at night. I'm losing flesh. That man and his poetry haunt me. I'm getting gloomy and morose. Life is beginning to pall upon me. I seem to be under the influence of a perpetual nightmare. I can't stand it much longer, Mr. Grady; my reason will totter upon its throne. Here, only this morning, he sent me a poem entitled "Lines to Hannah." Are you fond of ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... death." But Drake looked round at Doughty with a smile And said, "Forgive me now: thou art not used To these cold nights at sea! thou tremblest, friend; Let us go down and drink a cup of sack To our return!" And at that kindly smile Doughty shook off his nightmare mood, and thought, "The yard-arm is for dogs, not gentlemen! Even Drake would not misuse a man of birth!" And in the cabin of the Golden Hynde Revolving subtle treacheries he sat. There with the sugared phrases of the court ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... each other. Billy rubbed his eyes as though he really began to believe he must be asleep, and passing through a vivid dream bordering on the nightmare. ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... must discriminate between the clothes and the body. A truth's prosperity is like a jest's, it lies in the ear of him that hears it. Some may see our lucubration as we saw it, and others may see nothing but a drunken dream or the nightmare of a distempered imagination. To ourselves it is the speaking with unknown tongues to the early Corinthians; we cannot fully understand our own speech, and we fear lest there be not a sufficient number of interpreters present to make our utterance ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... not advance a step, the country was so extremely monotonous. Plains of sand, forests of birch tree, and villages at a great distance from each other, composed of wooden houses all built upon the same plan: these were the only objects that my eyes encountered. I felt that sort of nightmare which sometimes seizes one during the night, when you think you are always marching and never advancing. The country appeared to me like the image of infinite space, and to require eternity to traverse it. Every instant you met couriers passing, who ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Southey's, "a number of worldlings made a world." With some unfortunate people, the much dreaded "world" shrinks into one person of more mental power than their own, or perhaps merely of coarser nature; and the fancy as to what this person will say about anything they do, sits upon them like a nightmare. Happy the man who can embark his small adventure of deeds and thoughts upon the shallow waters round his home, or send them afloat on the wide sea of humanity, with no great anxiety in either case as to what reception they may meet with! He would have them steer by the stars, ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... might be saved. Even that was not enough, the life of her beautiful boy was called for. Then other memories swept into Esther's frenzied brain. She remembered vague hints, allusions that Mrs. Spires had thrown out; and as if in the obtuseness of a nightmare, it seemed to this ignorant girl that she was the victim of a dark and far-reaching conspiracy; she experienced the sensation of the captured animal, and she scanned the doors and windows, thinking of ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... dawn, intending to follow the King's march [255], and watch and pray near the awful battle-field. Edith listened, and made no reply; the terrors of the abbess infected her; the example of the two monks woke the sole thought which stirred through the nightmare dream that suspended reason itself; and when, at noon the abbess again sought the chamber, Edith was gone;—gone, and alone—none ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... first started at the late visitor, then he stared at him in consternation. He now went towards him, stretched out both hands as if suddenly relieved of a nightmare, and a bright expression of such warm and sincere satisfaction overspread his countenance that Pontius wondered how he could have failed to observe what a well-cut ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... matter of fact, he took it very seriously. For while he was still firmly wedded to his ideal of fame and fortune, he was unceasingly haunted by the fearful nightmare of some interloper "beating his time," as he crudely ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... fallen upon the brilliant, pleasure-loving young monarch—so without warning—that it seemed to those of his court like some dread nightmare from which they might presently awake to a new morning, fair and gay as those they had known so little time ago, before the music and the mirth, the jewels and the festal robes that befit a court had given place to the gloom and mourning of these horrible days. As in a dream they had taken ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... drag it from my head, relying upon the sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head-foremost, I pitched from the yard. I knew where I was, from the rush of the air by my ears, but all else was a nightmare. A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. An utterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of gasping; there seemed no breath in my body. It was over one hundred ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... the devil the cause of pestilence, but he is also the immediate agent of nightmare and of nightsweats. At Moelburg in Thueringen, near Erfurt, a piper, who was accustomed to pipe at weddings, complained to his priest that the devil had threatened to carry him away and destroy him, on the ground of a practical joke played upon some companions, to wit, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... seriously. "It was so overpowering that it made me think of Saint Theresa's description of her torment in that oven in the wall of hell which had by kindly forethought on the part of the devil been arranged for her permanent tenancy. Of course, it was just a nightmare," he added, doubtfully; "or perhaps ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... interminable slides and sudden falls into bottomless crevasses. Avalanches rolled him down, icy aretes caught his body on the descent; and long after his waking and the chocolate he always took in bed, the agony and the oppression of that nightmare clung to him. But all this did not hinder him, once afoot, from devoting his whole morning to the most laborious ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... had the daughter of Adam Ward seen men at work like this. She drew closer to John's side and held to his arm as though half expecting him to vanish suddenly and leave her alone in this monstrous nightmare. ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... which raged day and night for so many weeks, became a continuous nightmare to the men engaged in it, every one of whom knew that upon its issue rested one of the great deciding factors of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... me to do, father, isn't it?" he still continued aloud. "To go into Parliament, and then work and fight for the peace of the world? To destroy the ghastly nightmare of war, to fight against the War-god, to put an end to this eternal making of implements of death. I have your consent, and your ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... I made an effort to shake off this nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously—faster—still faster—at length I ran. I felt a maddening desire to shriek aloud. Every succeeding wave of thought overwhelmed me with new terror, for, alas! I well, too well understood that to think, in my situation, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... longer terrified, and had recovered her nerve, but she still found it difficult to believe she was not dreaming. It seemed more like a nightmare than actuality that she should be sitting in a pitch-dark car, talking of love and Don Carlos to a Spanish outlaw who had captured her, and whose arm encircled her waist. She was not conscious of fear now, but Cojuelo's ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... to get back to the Villa Montmorency—from the distorted shadows of a nightmare to ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... never venomous. His wit was racy and exuberant never equivocal. Whether he describes his vis-a-vis at a hotel table, his Excellency So-and-So, as "one of those figures which appear to one when he has the nightmare—a fat frog without legs, who opens his mouth as wide as his shoulders, like a carpet-bag, for each bit, so that I am obliged to hold tight on by the table from giddiness"; whether he characterizes his colleagues ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... spellbound at the nightmare assortment of grotesqueries that gradually assembled around us, attracted no doubt by our light. The things were mainly sightless and of indescribable shape. Most of them were phosphorescent, and they avoided collisions in a way that suggested that they had ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... poured from the cups of the queen Of hell, to wake and be free From this nightmare we writhe in, Break out ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... sagacity, the clarity of vision, the sure divination of the truth amidst a fog of deceit, which has characterized almost the whole Press of the United States since those feverish days at the end of July, 1914, when the nightmare of war was so quickly succeeded by its dread reality. Efforts which might fairly be described as stupendous were put forth by the advocates of Kultur to win, if not the approval, at least the strict neutrality of America. That the program of calculated misrepresentation failed ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Alexander Berkman at last left the hell of Pennsylvania, where he had passed the best fourteen years of his life. No one had believed in the possibility of his survival. His liberation terminated a nightmare of fourteen years for Emma Goldman, and an important chapter of her career was ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... gallows! That, too, revolted me. To kill him, and then kill myself.... No, I must live. "Two lives, one death," she had said..... For a second or two my brain reeled with horror; I was certainly losing my self-possession. His voice broke upon that nightmare. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... to the light. There was nothing, not the slightest sign to denote that it was an instrument of death. I put it on the tray and walked with it towards the library without considering what I was doing. But suddenly in the passage I came to myself like awakening from a nightmare. I suddenly saw the blunder I was going to make, and I let the glass ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... necessary, and the nervo-mechanical action of his system increased with use, his thoughts again returned to their old misery. He would wake at night in his poor room, with the feeling that a ghostly nightmare sat on his soul; that a want—a loss—miserable, fearful—was present; that something of his heart was gone from him; and through the darkness he would hear the snap of the breaking sword, and lie for a moment overwhelmed beneath the assurance of the incredible fact. Could it ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... Miss Mischief, resuming her accustomed vivacity, "they really are up to something that will give the teachers a tremendous nightmare one of these fine nights. You just watch out, Miss Minturn—I've only got an inkling of the plot, but it's great, and I'm going to be on hand to see it, even if I can't ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... after the other; but that I believed I was a crazy man on this one subject—matrimonial monomania; that when I had gone through with one of these scrapes, and had suffered the severe punishment that was almost certain to follow, the whole was like a dream to me—a nightmare and nothing more. With regard to what was before me in this prison I should try and behave myself, and make the best of the situation; but I notified the Warden that I did not mean to do one bit of work if I could ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... had been a dream was changed into a horrid nightmare as the young officer advanced into the wood. About him lay the awful evidences. Coats, caps, weapons, bits of gear, all marked and emphasized with many, many shapeless, ghastly things. Here they ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... all far worse even than Max had expected; and the next few days were a nightmare. The resemblance between the girl and her mother—once his mother, whom he had as a boy adored—made the effect ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... everybody understands that it exists. "You are only a negro and are not entitled to the courteous treatment accorded to members of other races." Another cause is the feeling of insecurity. The lack of legal protection in the country is a constant nightmare to the colored people who are trying to accumulate a comfortable little home ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... presently and took her in her arms and said the comforting things people usually say at such times, and Mary submitted dumbly, as if it were a part of a bewildering dream. At times she was sure that she must wake up presently and find that she had been in the grip of a dreadful nightmare. It was that certainty which helped her ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... faintness overpowered Joyce, and the big tears rolled down her face. It had not, then, been all a hideous nightmare? Something sweet and real had remained after the terror and ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... essentially to this; you tell me that my hopes will not be realized, and therefore you make me necessarily and needlessly miserable. For God's sake, do not disperse my dreams. People are not satisfied with the answer that the nightmare has gone as well as the vision of bliss, and that fears are destroyed as much as hopes; because, as a matter of fact, they can contrive to dwell upon that part of the doctrine which is comfortable for the moment. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... had begun to tell her story with reluctance, dreading lest Thresk should attribute it to a woman's nerves and laugh. But he did not. He listened gravely, seriously; and, as she continued, that nightmare of an evening so lived again in her recollections that she could not but make it vivid in ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... I regard solitude as a relief from company. After all, what is it that we want with each other?—what do we expect to get from each other? I remember," he said, smiling, "a witty old lady saying to me once that eternity was a nightmare to her.—'For instance,' she said, 'I enjoy sitting here and talking to you very much; but if I thought it was going on to all eternity, I shouldn't like it at all.' Do we really want the company of any one for ever and ever? And if so, why? Do we want ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lights. But the candles burned very badly, by reason of the closeness of the Court in which so many persons had been gathered for so long; and shed but a poor illumination. My eyes were weary too with staring upon the people—now upon the monstrous face of Oates, that was like a nightmare for terror, now upon the prisoners so patient in the dock, and now upon my Lords on their high seats beneath the state, and especially upon that hard and bitter face of Chief Justice Scroggs who, if ever a man murdered innocent folk, was murdering to-day the three men before him, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... come to have a bad meaning in art. Visions of Whistler come before you when you hear it. Such visions are not of the best possible augury, for who loves a nightmare?" ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... band o' runnygades an' gone off fer plunder. We got holt o' most o' their guns very quiet, an' I put John Irons an' two o' his boys an' Peter Bones an' his boy Isr'el an' the two women with loaded guns on guard over 'em. If any on 'em woke up they was to ride the nightmare er lay still. Jack an' me an' Buckeye sneaked back up the trail fer 'bout twenty rod with our guns, an' then I told the young Injun to shoot off the moose call. Wall, sir, ye could 'a' heerd it from ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... beset with memories of the Pit, like scenes from some monstrous nightmare, and, try as he would, he could not dispel them. He would fix his mind and eyes on Miss Wilson's face, who was now sitting at her desk, and even as he looked at her the face of Brick Simpson, impudent and pugnacious, would arise before him. It was of no use. He felt sick and sore ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Louise; "every one judges from the exterior. All who are around her hate her, I believe, because her eyebrows are grown together, and that is said to be a sign that she is a nightmare: ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... fraction of it endures to the benefit of offspring. It dies with him in whom it is acquired, and the heirs of a man's body take no interest therein. To state this doctrine is to arouse instinctive loathing; it is my fortunate task to maintain that such a nightmare of waste and death is as baseless as ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... best sheriff the county had ever known. Quiet and unassuming, small of stature and with a kind word for every one, he was a universal favorite among the better class of citizens. Quick as a flash and unerring in his shooting, he was a nightmare to the "bad men." No profane word had ever been known to leave his lips, and he was the possessor of a widespread reputation for generosity. His face was naturally frank and open; but when his eyes narrowed with determination ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... I'll follow the lead of a murderous-looking villain like that unless he can show very good reasons why I should. His face is like a nightmare." ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... that Friday and the following Saturday, the inmates of the Old Mill lived in a horrible nightmare. The storm was now shaking the whole of France and Germany, the whole of quivering Europe. They heard it roar. The earth cracked under its fury. What terrible catastrophe ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... spot; she felt as though some nightmare oppression were on her. She heard her father's voice calling to her. 'Where is Audrey?' he said. 'She must bid Michael good-bye.' And then someone—Michael, ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... [nightmare], I think," he said, "for though I never had it before, it seemed to me very like what Guttorm Stoutheart says he always has after eating ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... rose, swift and gigantic, growing all the while greater and more terrible in girth, till at last when it was some hundreds of feet high it slowly stretched out at the top until it looked like some huge evil tree seen in a nightmare. ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... not sleep very well and he was up early in the morning and out on the rear platform, drinking in the fresh air. He felt as if he had passed through some fearful nightmare. ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... during which he stood awake and terrified had been so brief and so fraught with terror that it never seemed real to the lad in memory. There was something of the awful hopelessness of nightmare about it. Always afterward he had difficulty in convincing himself that he had not slept steadily from the time he drowsed on watch to the minute when he opened his eyes to the light of morning and felt his aching head throb ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... completely forgotten Rue Barree. During the week he worked with might and main at the studio, and Saturday night found him so tired that he went to bed before dinner and had a nightmare about a river of yellow ochre in which he was drowning. Sunday morning, apropos of nothing at all, he thought of Rue Barree, and ten seconds afterwards he saw her. It was at the flower-market on the marble bridge. She was examining a pot of pansies. The gardener had evidently thrown ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... deepest gloom prevailed. It was like a nightmare to the beleaguered household, a dream from which there seemed to be no awakening. Colonel Quinnox's first act after posting his forces in position to repel attacks from the now well-recognised enemy, was to make sure of the safety ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... room in which he had first returned to consciousness after the accident. He was on the same couch. The same masked figure was at the same desk. Had he been dreaming? Was this then only some horrible, ghastly nightmare ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... primitive ghost-worship. There is nothing simple in these beliefs: they are awful, tremendous beliefs; and before Buddhism helped to dissipate them, their pressure upon the mind of a people dwelling in a land of cataclysms, must have been like an endless weight of nightmare. But the elder beliefs, in softened form, are yet a fundamental part of the existing cult. Though Japanese ancestor-worship has undergone many modifications in the past two thousand years, these modifications have not transformed its essential character ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... disgusted. "My lord," he said, "this would not be believed in Venice. Make her amends;" but, like a madman talking in his nightmare, Othello poured out his foul thought in ugly speech, and ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... her face, 'I know you didn't mean to wound me; but it was there, your feeling; I saw it at once. I might have seen it, if I hadn't been a fool, in Mr. Wallace's manner. I did see it. It's only what every one whose opinion is worth having is beginning to say. My acting has been a nightmare to me lately. I believe it has all been a great, ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a ridiculous nightmare! I can't understand it at all. The man that wrote this letter may be mad—but he is neither a pirate nor a ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... conscious of a sense of exultation at having escaped from the miasmic atmosphere of that room of unholy memories. And a faint hope began to dawn within my bosom that, as I increased the distance between myself and it, I might shake off something of the nightmare helplessness which numbed and tortured me. I lingered for a moment by the window; then stepped over the short dividing wall into the street; and then again ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and sympathize.... Those shots you heard ended a feud which has lived through three or four generations. They brought me back to earth, to life, to a realization of things about me, after the most horrible nightmare through which I've ever passed. I know my own name now,—and I had almost forgotten it since I went back home—so short a time, so ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer surprise that, after all, this business of war was something more real than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came back to them and became the normal instead of the abnormal. They were back again ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... we have done with each other now—we don't even speak much except in public, that's my price for holding my tongue about the lady in London and one or two other little things—so what is the use of talking of it? It was a horrible nightmare, but it has gone. And then," she went on, fixing her beautiful eyes upon his face, "then I saw you, Edward, and for the first time in my life I learnt what love was, and I think that no woman ever loved like that before. Other women ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... compromise with Carleton that would give me his support. This coming election was beginning to have terrors for me that I have never before felt. The thought of defeat—having to go back to comparative poverty, to comparative obscurity, with you as my wife, was growing into a nightmare. I should have wanted wealth, fame, victory, for your sake—to see you honoured, courted, envied, finely dressed and finely housed—grateful to me for having won for you these things. It wasn't honest, healthy love—the love that unites, that makes a man willing to take as well as ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... on his insecure perch, and there was the mysterious grey car, which now was become a veritable nightmare, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... believe, if she didn't fancy in her vague mind, obscured by drink, that the man who had sent her boy from her might bring him back to her. For weeks she came every day—walking all the way from Drury Lane, mind you—to ask if the boy had returned. Then she endured the nightmare of my company, as I told you, while we searched in likely places for the vanished sea urchin. Jack did nothing for the support of his mother. It was she who kept him. She beat him. She cursed him. She fed him. She loved him; like an animal, perhaps, like a mother, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Policeman Gall, two days before. In the sunshine of John's young personality, fears grew small and hope grew big. The ideas which had passed through Mr. Juxon's brain on the previous evening, just after Mr. Ambrose had warned him of Goddard's intentions, seemed now like the evil shadows of a nightmare. All apprehension lest the convict should attempt to execute his threats disappeared like darkness before daylight, and in the course of an hour or two the squire found himself laughing and chatting with his guest as though there were no such things as forgery or convicts in the world. ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... to sleep again, and fell at length into a kind of painful torpor. I fancied I heard birds of prey crying, and a roaring noise in the recesses of the forest. I got up with a view of driving away this nightmare; but it was not a dream; the day was just breaking, and the birds were welcoming its advent with many a clamorous note. A dull roar, like that of a gale of wind rattling through a forest, resounded louder and louder. I called Sumichrast and ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... the peaceful hills at Bremerton—where he had gone on Mrs. Whitely's invitation—he began to look back upon the spring and winter as a kind of mad nightmare, a period of ceaseless, distracted, and dissipated activity, of rushing hither and thither with no results. He had been aware of invisible barriers, restricting, hemming him in on all sides. There had been no time for reflection; and now that he had a breathing space, he was unable to see ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... generalisation and detail, not to be uttered in words. One thing at least may fitly be said here. Before he died he did at least two things that he desired. One may seem much greater than the other; but he would not have shrunk from naming them together. He saw the end of an empire that was the nightmare of the nations; but I believe it pleased him almost as much that he had been able, often in the intervals of bitter warfare and by the aid of a brilliant memory, to put together these pages on the history, so necessary and so strangely neglected, of the great ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... "Stop, before you say what can never be unsaid. You know it is not true. These are nightmare visions that ride you. Not from Spy Rock nor from anywhere else can you see anything at Hilltop that is not honest and pure and loyal. Come down, now, and let us go home. You will see better there ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him, would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinct race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now. That made an acute difference. This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but actuality. And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was like the men of that group on the Queen Mary who were similarly mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Jeanie's hand in nightmare fear. The anguish of the revelation was almost unendurable. She felt as if he had caught her quivering soul and was thrusting it into an inferno from which it could never rise again. Through and above that awful laughter she seemed to hear the crackling of the flames, to feel ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... husband's. The great need of her heart compelled her to strangle, with desperate resolution, every rising impulse of suspicion, pride, and resentment; she felt equal to any self-infliction that would save her from ceasing to love. That would have been like the hideous nightmare in which the world had seemed to break away all round her, and leave her feet overhanging the darkness. Romola had never distinctly imagined such a future for herself; she was only beginning to feel the presence of effort in that clinging ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... through the cracks above died away, and the darkness became gross. The air in the hold was stifling; our souls panted for the wind and the stars outside. At the worst, when the fetid blackness lay upon our chests like a nightmare, the hatch was suddenly lifted, a rush of pure air came to us, and with it the sound of men's voices speaking on the deck above. Said one, "True the doctor pronounces him out of all danger, yet he is a ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... in reform. I want to see you free, but I do not see that what you ask for will give you what you want. I think you have fallen into just the same mistake as the rich, of whom you complain—the very mistake which has been our curse and our nightmare. I mean the mistake of fancying that legislative reform is social reform, or that men's hearts can be changed by Act of Parliament. If any one will tell me of a country where a Charter made the rogues honest, or the idle industrious, I will alter my opinion of the Charter, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... be doubted, that Singletary's story was the result of the workings of an excited imagination, in wild and frightful dreams under the spasms of nightmare. We shall meet similar phenomena, when we come to the testimony ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Hades, the descent to which is easy, here the ascent is inviting; though, alike in both cases, "revocare gradum, hoc opus hic labor est." They persevere upward and onward till they come, in more senses than one, to "an untimely end." Perhaps stuck fast in a small pipe tile, they die a nightmare death; or, perhaps overtaken by a shower, of the effect of which, in their ignorance of the scientific principles of drainage, they had no conception, they are drowned before they have time for deliverance from the straight ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... after they are gone may deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new victims of his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... couldn't even think—and my body was numb as a dead man's all below the hips. There I stood like I was chained to the floor—you know how it is in a nightmare when something chases you and you can't run? That was ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... on purely ordinary topics. There was only a minute or two, after the dessert had been placed upon the table and the remaining man servant had gone out with a message, during which they were alone. Then Virginia summoned up her courage to speak of the matter which was like a nightmare in her thoughts. ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... poor hert that never rejoices!" he would say, at the conclusion of such a nightmare interview. "But I must get to my plew- stilts." And he would seclude himself as usual in his back room, and Archie go forth into the night and the city quivering with ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slept an hour and more when he was brought to his senses by a thin and prolonged shriek. It was Emmeline in a nightmare, or more properly a day-mare, brought on by a meal of sardines and the haunting memory of the gibbly-gobbly-ums. When she was shaken (it always took a considerable time to bring her to, from these seizures) and comforted, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... and tired figure of a woman who has lived through her many days of toil and suffered many labours. It is believed by a medical authority that the master meant the statue to represent rest after a labour, but it is rather the nightmare-troubled sleep of a tired woman, whose beautiful firm hips and worn breasts prove her to have bravely met and passed through many cares, and suckled many children. A horrid mask, symbolising these memories, in bad dreams, grimaces beside her left hand. The eyes of the mask are cut double ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... His love for Romola was a higher and deeper passion than anything he felt for the child-like, submissive little Tessa, and when she told him frankly of her brother's warning vision, he set himself to convince her it was the mere nightmare of a diseased imagination, and the perfect love and trust she had for him made the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... are we to do with that place? It gives me a nightmare. The extraordinary thing is the way that everything in it has gone to ruin. Did your mother really live here while ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... After two years of war, there was to be polo again that spring and early summer. The Cherry Hill Hunt team was still intact, although some of the visiting outfits had been badly shot to pieces by the war. But the war was over. It lay behind, a nightmare to be forgotten as soon as possible. It had left its train of misery and ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 125l. a year, besides board and lodging for his family, who keep the farm-house. When every expense is paid, mine host netts a clear six per cent. on his farm, and I think you will allow that he may go to bed at night with little fear of the nightmare of a starving labourer disturbing his slumbers. Not that he troubles sleep much, for he is the nearest thing to perpetual motion I ever saw, not excepting even the armadillo at the Zoological Gardens, and he has more "irons in the fire" than ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... was spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul. There is an intensity of consideration in the piece that shows it to be the transcript of familiar thoughts. It is the quintessence of many a doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dogs, now, vaguely as in a nightmare. But after a little while he began to believe that their hysterical yelping was ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... man of cities, feels a kindred turbulence within himself. Jesus, the interpreter of nature, feels the steady persuasiveness of the sunshine of God, and grows from childhood in stature, wisdom, and favour with God and man. It is contended by some that the whole Pauline conception of sin is a nightmare, and rests upon ideas of God and man which are unworthy and untrue. 'As a matter of fact,' says Sir Oliver Lodge, 'the higher man of to-day is not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their punishment; his ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the "Kai-yai, hai-yah" of Little Thunder wailing down the storm from before him and the martial notes of the trader behind him demanding cheers for Her Majesty's naval and military forces, he seemed to himself to be in the grip of some ghastly nightmare which, try as he might, he was ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... last hours, suffer in mind. The effects of death on the frame do not necessarily disturb the tranquillity of the soul. The body may be in spasms while the soul is at peace; and the reverse is true;—as in nightmare, when the mind is distressed while the body sleeps. A Christian has nothing to fear in this respect. To die will not be—as in full health we suppose it is—a violent rending asunder of the soul from the unyielding grasp of the ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... the victim of a terrible nightmare, and that, when she waked, her mind would be relieved of this intolerable torture. She helplessly clung to Raoul's arm as he helped her ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... thoughts, exasperated, humiliated, and despondent, the people brooded over their wretched fate, and sullenly submitted to the reign of terror which was inaugurated amongst them. Little had the Irish patriots to look forward to in that dark hour of suffering and disappointment. A nightmare of blood and violence weighed down the spirits of the people; a stupor appeared to have fallen on the nation; and though time might be trusted to arouse them from the trance, they had suffered another loss, not so easily repaired, in the death and dispersion of their leaders. Where ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... cheeks, the bridge of the nose depressed, and the end turned up; the mouth puckered, and no chin whatever, or hardly any. The expression was not calm and happy; but rather as if he were in a perturbed slumber, perhaps nothing short of nightmare. I wonder that the family allow this cast to be shown,—the last record that there is of Scott's personal reality, and conveying such a wretched and unworthy idea ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... declared that if he thought that likely he shouldn't mind so much. What he feared most was a nightmare ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... church." They burned, hacked, and devoured the neophytes; exterminated whole villages at once; destroyed the nations whom the Fathers hoped to convert; and ruined that sure ally of the missions, the fur-trade. Not the most hideous nightmare of a fevered brain could transcend in horror the real and waking perils with which they beset the path of ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... The Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of the perpetually begging Friars. The Morris-dance of the Heretics. The Whinings of Cajetan. Muddisnout Doctoris Cherubici, de origine Roughfootedarum, et Wryneckedorum ritibus, libri septem. Sixty-nine fat Breviaries. The Nightmare of the five Orders of Beggars. The Skinnery of the new Start-ups extracted out of the fallow-butt, incornifistibulated and plodded upon in the angelic sum. The Raver and idle Talker in cases of Conscience. The Fat Belly of the Presidents. The Baffling Flouter ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... from him like a nightmare that calls a man from his sleep by its false peril, wringing sweat from him in its agony. Let them bind in drink and sever in blood, for all that he cared. It was nothing to him, any way they might combine or clash. Joan was ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... cut out the war. Thousands of brainy people will be spending the next few years of their lives telling you all about it. But I should rather like to treat it as a blank, a period of penal servitude, a drugged sleep afflicted with nightmare, a bit of metempsychosis in the middle of normal life—you know what I mean. The thing that is I is not General Lackaday. It is Somebody Else. So I have given you, for what it is worth, the story of Somebody Else. The MS. is in a beast ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... nightmare; a nightmare is usually a muddled kind of thing with no connections at all; it is a dream turned into a blasphemy. The book may mean several things; it is quite possible that it may mean nothing; there is no need for a novel to mean anything so long as it ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... weary and apparently interminable marching became a perfect nightmare of horrors to me. The more firmly fixed became the realization that the girl's friendship had meant so much to me, the more I came to miss it; and the more impregnable the barrier of silly pride. But I was very young and would not ask Ghak for the ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... animal, physical fear—she had felt that stick, it was a nightmare to her, as it might have been to a child. She knew that Hans would keep his word. His physical strength had been one of the things she had adored in him—but to be degraded and exposed, as well as beaten, ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... the berries of the former were not more vivid than her dress, and the brown leaves of the latter not more brown and wrinkled than her cheeks. At first sight King Arthur thought he must be bewitched—no such nightmare of a human face had ever seemed to him possible. Her nose was crooked and bent hideously to one side, while her chin seemed to bend to the opposite side of her face; her one eye was set deep under her beetling brow, and her mouth was nought but a gaping slit. Round ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... or contentment. Alice was not in poverty, she was not eating the unhallowed bread of vice, or earning the bitter wages of laborious penury. He saw her in reputable, nay, opulent circumstances. A dark nightmare, that had often, amidst the pleasures of youth, or the triumphs of literature, weighed upon his breast, was removed. He breathed more freely—he could sleep in peace. His conscience could no longer say to him, "She who slept upon thy bosom is a wanderer upon the face of the earth—exposed ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... body almost black above and shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a—. Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such turn as above. He now distinctly remembered having read some years ago a most interesting illustrated ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... he was sure, for it felt cold and damp, and—there it was again, evidently coming up between the bamboos of the floor, and seeking about, and—Why, it was a hand, and it grasped his wrist! Ali wanted to call aloud, but he felt as if suffering from nightmare; to leap up, but he felt helpless, and lay bathed in perspiration. He knew what it was now; some miscreant beneath the house, seeking out ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... I felt the horror of nightmare seize me, for it bore a striking resemblance to Ombos. A dreadful exuberance and vitality seemed to shine through the thing, an exuberance wholly malign, a vitality that foamed and frothed with unimaginable evil. Evil beamed from the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Mrs. Thayer the occurrences which my investigations had disclosed, it seemed to the latter as if she were the victim of a horrible nightmare. She felt that she was surrounded by unseen foes, who were gradually tightening the toils in which she and Pattmore had become entangled. She was neither brave nor self-sacrificing; she had a sensitive dread of exposure, trial, and punishment, which was aggravated by a knowledge ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton |
